Product Description
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite,[1] notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda.[2] "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.[3]
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976.[4] In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks,[5] eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time.[6] It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist.[7]
It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time
selling over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the
song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two
on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992).[8] In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian
Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered
one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied
by a groundbreaking promotional video.[9] Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air."[10] The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.[11]
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[12] It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music,[13] and Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of
Rolling Stone.[14] In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century,[15] and it has been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.[
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.